It seems to me that organizations that keep doing this–making stricter and stricter rules about adult/child contact–are really missing the point. The appalling thing isn’t that child molestation happened. It’s probably going to happen. The problem is the cover-up afterwards.
Honestly, all the safeguards probably make it worse: I think the first thing people say to each other when they perpetuate these cover-ups is "Well, we won’t leave him alone with kids. We will make sure it doesn’t happen again. Then, when it happens again–“Damn, those rules weren’t strict enough”. Pretending that the problem is too much access to kids and that if only the protocols were better it would be okay is at best a red herring.
Meh. Another irrelevant artifact bites the dust. Good riddance. Hope the Girl Scouts follow soon. Maybe one day they can be replaced by organizations that are actually relevant and safe.
The national organization might be kaput. But seriously, who pays any attention to National? The individual troops are pretty much completely independent.
Interesting. A bunch of people were so worried about the Girls Scouts USA suing Boy Scouts of America for trademark infringement that they forgot about this. I said that BSA was adding female scouting to make more money, but others said there was no way since BSA was richer and had other types of built in funding.
One guy even predicted that BSA taking on female scouts would spell the end of GSUSA.
(I’m doing this for my Rambling Anecdote merit badge…)
As a kid in the 50s, Boy Scouts was the best way to get out in the wilderness (and play Lord of the Flies, of course…).
Our leaders were not only our fathers, but they were all ex-military, most of them recently back from Germany or the Pacific. I honestly think if there was even a rumor of inappropriate contact, the guilty party would’ve been on the receiving end of a canteen of whoop-ass.
Later, in Explorer Scouts, we had girls and their moms involved, and we had a gay leader. Who was great! In later years, every time I ran into an old Scout friend, I asked them about Mr. Fabulosky (obv. not his real name) and no one had anything but unalloyed praise.
I even asked my Staff Sergeant Dad (who’d been on all the campouts) if he’d known we had a gay leader. He said “Of course! We all knew. But he was up front about it, and knew that if he’d acted on it with any of the boys… we’d have known and remedied it before anything happened.” "Remedied it?"
“Instantly. Strongly… Permanently.”